[pulseaudio-discuss] Port icons, +11 dB, ABI stability

[David Henningsson]

We had some sound related discussions today at the Ubuntu Developer 
Summit, which I just wanted to write down and share with you before I 
forget about it...

1) Icons per port
  The new sound settings UI exposes ports as its primary object and as 
such it would be nice to have one icon for the Headphones port and 
another icon for the Speaker port.
 From what I can tell this would be quite simple? As Tanu has written 
infrastructure that can take port properties from the path .conf file, 
and that is then exposed to client.

2) +11dB
The people within the discussion - including myself - seem to mostly 
agree that for the sound settings UI, it makes most sense to remove the 
possibilty to set more than 0dB output for the device volume, but 
instead allow it for stream volumes. The argument is that the most 
common use case for this is that you're listening to DVD/flash movies, 
where the particular application would be what's bothering you. 
Therefore it would make more sense to boost the application, rather than 
the device.

3)
Some questions were raised about PulseAudio's ABI stability. I think 
we're pretty hard on not introducing anything that breaks the ABI for 
clients, ever, but what about modules? I'm assuming that since modules 
can call into the core very arbitrarily, we would not assume any kind of 
ABI stability for modules, not even between stable releases (1.0 to 1.1, 
e g). Is that correct? I e, if I compile a module against 1.0 and 
distribute the binary, once PA 1.1 is rolled out, there is a possibility 
that my module will crash PulseAudio unless the module is recompiled 
against 1.1.

// David